So. The economy. Not so fun, eh?
After updating my net worth this month, I’ve decided that for the next month, I’m not going to look at my investment accounts. Or at least, I’m going to try to not look at my investment acounts for the next month. I might not even include them in my net worth update and just look at my cash accounts and cds.
Why? Because these are long term investments. The point isn’t what’s happening over a few days or a few weeks. The point is that they are supposed to grow for future use. Worrying about them now doesn’t do me any good. In fact, I’m finding it a little stressful.
So for now, I’m going to just ignore those accounts. Oh, I’m going to continue to invest, don’t worry. Not quite ready to stop those 401(k) contributions yet. But I’m not going to keep looking and worrying about what’s happening.
Of course, this experiment could very well fail sometime next week when I just can’t take it anymore and have to peek at my accounts. We’ll just have to see.
Megan is a 40-something government employee in the Washington, DC area. She got interested in Personal Finance when she got out of college and realized that her paycheck wasn’t going to go as far as she had hoped. Since starting this blog, she has managed to buy a house and make a solid start on her retirement goals, and hopes to help others do the same. Here is her story:
In 2007, I was a gainfully employed 20-something with no debt but not a lot of knowledge about personal finance. It was a co-worker’s comment about Roth IRAs that sent me to the internet, searching for information. It was then that I realized that I really didn’t know a whole lot about personal finance and that my current financial situation was due a lot to inherent frugal tendencies, generous family members, a fear of debt, and good luck. While that was working for me, clearly I needed a better plan.
While I had no debt, I was also pretty much living paycheck to paycheck and not worrying about going over budget (I say this as if I had a real budget) because I had an emergency fund set aside to cover any overages.
Except that’s not what an emergency fund is for.
So I did a lot of research, read a lot of blogs, and decided that I needed a plan. I needed to budget. I needed to know what I was spending my money on. I needed to prepare for the future.
I decided to create a blog not only to make myself accountable to others but also to share the knowledge that I gained along the way. I’ve learned so much from my fellow bloggers, and I hope that my readers can find something useful in what I have to share as well.
Good luck. I couldn’t do it, I had to take a look.